There has been an increased focus on training workers to do their jobs effectively and safely preliminary to doing the work for which they were hired. This kind of vocational education and certification is now required in many instances by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) to ensure safe work practices. There are basic safety practices which will be pertinent for a large variety of workplaces, particularly those of a single industry or a related group of industries, and then there are practices which will be peculiar to a particular plant or worksite and which relate to the exact work conditions, apparatus and processes obtaining at that site. The general, basic safety practices are conventionally given in a traditional classroom setting and are taught by human instructors. Specific, customized safety practices have conventionally been the job of safety personnel assigned to a particular plant or worksite.
Another recent trend is an increasing dependency by industry on independent contractors rather than employees. These contractors are retained for relatively short periods by any one plant or workplace, and often work at several sites owned by different proprietors within a single year. At the start of each work period at a work site, the contractor has had to be recertified; this had resulted in repetitious, unnecessary and expensive recertification procedures undertaken by each different plant proprietor of a single contractor during a year. Also, the plant proprietors are reluctant to routinely provide such safety instruction to persons who are not long-term employees.
Recently, in an attempt to address this problem, in the State of Texas a local group of petrochemical plants has federated into a Safety Council. This Safety Council is a nonprofit organization that provides a central facility for the instruction of contract workers who tend to circulate among the plants. A basic, instructor-led safety course is given, and then the workers are put through a computer-generated, plant specific course for the facility at which they would like to work. The computer instruction concludes with a test which, if the worker passes, will certify the worker on safety requirements for a particular plant for a given, usually long period of time, such as a year or more. Each worker's test results (typically simplified to whether the worker passed or has not yet passed a safety test for a particular facility) is stored in a database at the Safety Council. These test outcomes are accessible by each plant proprietor/member of the Safety Council, for the purpose of determining whether that contract worker is qualified to work at the plant in question. This arrangement obviates repetitive and unnecessary instruction and testing while still maintaining acceptable levels of worker safety knowledge.
While this Safety Council has been effective in providing a pooled safety program for a local group of plants, improvements could still be made with respect to geographic availability.